All posts by: Sarah Hansen, M.S. '15

Bahama Oriole Project team awarded NSF grant to offer more UMBC undergrads international research experiences

UMBC is recognized as a national leader in undergraduate teaching, in part because the university connects so many students with meaningful research opportunities. Now, a new $300,000 NSF International Research Experiences for Students grant will enable one team of UMBC faculty across three departments to offer research and cross-cultural learning experiences to even more students.

Kevin Omland, professor of biological sciences and the lead on the new grant, sees student research as essential to science, and both undergraduate and graduate students have played a major role in his international field research for decades. Many students have gotten involved through the Bahama Oriole Project, a collaborative initiative with Bahamian scientists and conservationists to save the critically endangered Bahama Oriole.

The project began in 2016 and has taken eight students to the Bahamas for research so far. “It’s a great opportunity for students to make a huge impact,” Omland says. “The students have already made many key contributions.”

International advantage

Matthew Kane ’19, biological sciences, has been to the Bahamas twice with Omland. Before his first trip, he’d never been on a plane. “My third flight was a rough charter to Andros Island,” Kane says. On the most recent trip, he collected data to measure rat populations on the island. The rats are known to consume oriole eggs, and Kane wants to figure out how severe a threat they are to oriole populations.

Kane selected and ordered peanut butter-scented wax baits, worked with other students to set them out in strategic locations, and then regularly checked them for tell-tale bite marks indicating the presence of rats. Being a star on UMBC’s cross country team certainly helped as he traipsed miles through the dry pine forest, day after day.

“Being on the Bahama Oriole Project was my first hands-on glimpse at international research,” Kane says. “It was the first time I had seen scientists from two different countries collaborating on a conservation project on this scale.” The relationships Omland has developed with local scientists and the Bahamas National Trust are huge assets in the work to save the Bahama Oriole, and in creating a memorable student experience.

Traveling to the Bahamas and developing his own relationships with Bahamian scientists “showed me how important it is to have these diverse perspectives in projects like this,” Kane says, “because having the expertise of the Bahamas National Trust as well as this lab is giving the project a much bigger boost than if only one or the other was working on it.”

Creating opportunities

This is exactly the kind of reflection Omland and his UMBC colleagues on the grant—Matthew Fagan, Jane Arnold Lincove, and Colin Studds—hope to hear from students. Through the project, “students can get a sense of endangered species, and climate change, and some of the challenges that are unique to island species, but it’s also an amazing cultural opportunity for them,” Omland says.

“It’s like a combination of being an exchange student and being a researcher,” adds Lincove, associate professor of public policy. Many of the students who participate may have had limited opportunities to travel previously, adding to the experience’s impact.

“UMBC is a younger school with lots of recent immigrants, first-generation college students, and underrepresented minority students who might not have had a chance to go to summer camp in the Rockies or go to France with their parents to see museums,” says Omland. “This project provides an amazing opportunity for these students.”

Interdisciplinary efforts

On top of that, “the students from different disciplines are going to have to learn how to communicate with each other,” says Fagan, assistant professor of geography and environmental systems. The project includes students studying biology, geography, and statistics, and Omland is open to recruiting students from other relevant fields. The diversity of expertise will allow the group “to tackle a real diversity of problems,” Fagan adds.

In addition to Kane’s predator work, Fagan will help students make detailed habitat maps of the island. The mapping work will include boots-on-the-ground fieldwork as well as take advantage of “fun 21st century technologies” like remote sensing, Fagan explains. It could help the team investigate how fire affects the island’s ecosystems or predict how sea level rise may change the availability of habitat for the orioles and other species.

Studds, assistant professor of geography and environmental systems, has been working with a student to improve population estimates for the Bahama Oriole using cutting-edge statistical techniques. He’ll also look at predator populations.

Looking to the future

Lincove has a different role to play. She and her graduate students will evaluate the project, so the researchers “can think about what they want to do in the next year and if it’s meeting their goals for what they want the students to get out of it.”

Lincove’s team will interview the students several times, up until graduation and potentially beyond. They’ll be looking at whether research in the Bahamas influenced the students’ career paths, academic performance at UMBC, and other outcomes. Because of the international factor, her team will also look at whether the experience changes how students think about other cultures.

The results will be helpful for the Bahama Oriole team in planning future student research trips, and the experience will also be valuable for Lincove’s policy students. “I’m trying to give our students hands-on evaluation work to do,” she says. Working directly with UMBC faculty and students rather than being handed a gigantic database by a distant corporation, she explains, “makes it a better learning experience for my students.”

Overall, “a major goal of the grant is to increase the diversity of students and researchers interested in and working on environmental science and ecology conservation projects,” Omland says. This might sound like a lofty goal, but he feels confident that UMBC is well-positioned to make this vision a reality, and to keep producing high-quality, high-impact science along the way.

Banner image: Omland, Michael Rowley ’18, Cierra Mckoy ’20, and Yancy set up a mist net that temporarily captures birds for data collection. Photo by Matthew Kane ’19.

New UMBC research suggests need to rethink goals of global reforestation efforts

Many countries have made commitments to restore huge areas of forest as part of the Bonn Challenge, organized by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. For example, Costa Rica has promised to preserve 1 million hectares (3,861 square miles) of forest by 2020—about 20 percent of the nation’s total area. However, a new paper in Conservation Letters suggests that quickly reforesting large areas may not be the best strategy to yield many of the benefits forests can provide.

Forests store carbon, clean water, prevent soil erosion, and provide habitat for a wide range of species, “but all those benefits start kicking in when forests are older,” says Matthew Fagan, assistant professor of geography and environmental systems at UMBC and second author on the paper. That’s why the new paper’s findings were alarming: By analyzing a massive data set spanning 1947 – 2014, the authors found that in Costa Rica, 50 percent of secondary forest patches were re-cleared within 20 years, and 85 percent were re-cleared within 54 years.

A long-term commitment

“Young forests take something like 100 years to get to peak biodiversity, and as many as 80 years to store enough carbon to make a big difference,” Fagan says. “A lot of these benefits accumulate over time, and they don’t accrue linearly,” he adds, so a 100-year-old forest is more than ten times as beneficial as a 10-year-old forest.

Committing to preserve a huge number of hectares of forest by 2020 might be appealing to a government trying to make a statement, but “for every 100 hectares restored in 2020, 20 years later they’re going to have 50, and 50 years later they’re only going to have 15,” Fagan says.

Lead study author Leighton Reid, an assistant scientist at the Missouri Botanical Garden’s Center for Conservation and Sustainable Development, says that he would prefer to see countries “commit to restore an area of 100-year-old forest by 2120.” He added, “What I hope is that this research is going to lead to countries taking a more long-term view of their restoration commitments.”

Green highways

The good news is that the study found certain types of forest patches were less likely to be re-cleared, particularly larger patches and those alongside rivers. That’s critical, because as research partner Joshua Slaughter ’22, computer engineering, explains, previous research has found that “patches just 30 feet across can serve as highways for rare endangered bird species to travel through the landscape.” By teasing apart the relationships between external factors and the likelihood of a patch to persist, Slaughter hopes the team’s work will inform new, targeted restoration policies.

“As long as these forests are being protected, it can help prevent extinction of endangered species,” Slaughter says. “And being directly related to something as big as that has a huge impact on me and why I want to continue pursuing research.”

Slaughter has been working with Fagan since his junior year of high school, and is now a first-year student at UMBC and an author on the new paper. The project brings his interests together seamlessly.

“I want to incorporate my passion for geography with my passion for coding and making devices, so GIS [geographic information systems] is the middle ground where I can reach both fields without dedicating myself to just one,” says Slaughter. He plans to pursue a Ph.D. and then a research career combining computer engineering, environmental systems, and GIS.

Taking a closer look

Overall, “all of our hopes and needs for secondary forests rely on them getting old, and what this study shows is that they aren’t,” Reid says. His main hope for this study is that it will lead to “people, and in particular, national governments, taking more seriously the problems of ensuring that restoration projects persist into the future.”

“We want a world with more forests—where soil isn’t eroding off hillsides, and where trees take carbon dioxide out of the air to help limit climate change. We want to see people drinking clean water and breathing clean air, and secondary forests are seen as a major way to get to that,” Fagan says. “The tropics have been deforested for decades, and now they’re starting to regrow. It’s a really big positive story, but we need to take a closer look.”

Banner image: Matthew Fagan (left) and Joshua Slaughter. Photo by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC.

Twenty years of the Baltimore Ecosystem Study: An icon of urban ecology research

The Baltimore Ecosystem Study (BES) is one of only two urban Long-Term Ecological Research projects initially funded by the National Science Foundation, and this year it turns 20. When the BES was founded in 1998, “The field of urban ecology basically didn’t exist,” says Claire Welty, director of UMBC’s Center for Urban Environmental Research and Education. Since then, the field has flourished, in no small part thanks to dedicated researchers in Baltimore.

The BES has succeeded in compiling massive datasets on the Baltimore region’s watershed, ecology, and sociological issues related to the environment. The extent of these data are unparalleled anywhere else in the world. That makes the study “an international icon,” Welty says, and its wealth of fully public data provides “a rich resource for people to use in their research.”

“We’re living in a rapidly changing environment,” says Andy Miller, professor of geography and environmental systems (GES) and chair of the department when the study was founded. The long-term data the BES collects allows researchers to document “how systems change in response to what we do” on and to the landscape, Miller explains. That includes large-scale development of previously undisturbed ecosystems. If we can learn enough, Miller says, that knowledge may create “opportunities to mitigate the effects of urbanization.”

Moving on those opportunities requires collaboration with policymakers at many levels. Over the course of the BES, its researchers have gained the trust of local and state officials who have found BES data helpful in informing policy discussions, says Miller. Employees from the Maryland Department of the Environment, Department of Natural Resources, and others regularly attend BES quarterly meetings.

At the federal level, scientists and managers from the USDA Forest Service’s Baltimore Field Station and from the US Geological Survey’s MD-DE-DC Water Science Center have been long-term partners, contributing to and benefiting from the BES program. Both are located at the bwtech@UMBC Research & Technology Park.

Beyond the flood of data and influence on policy, “The impact of the BES on research infrastructure and training in Baltimore has been so important,” says Miller. The BES is headquartered on UMBC’s campus, and the presence of the program here has helped faculty successfully apply for funding to support related projects. It even enabled the launch of UMBC’s graduate program in GES by facilitating funding of the program’s first students through the NSF’s Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship program.

The education component of the BES extends far beyond the graduate level. Its education arm works with K-12 students throughout the Baltimore region to teach them about their local ecosystems and the importance of caring for the environment, with the goal of raising a generation of young people committed to environmental stewardship.

Today, “More than half of the world’s population lives in cities,” says Chris Swan, professor of GES and a BES scientist, “and understanding how these environments function from the natural, physical and social science perspectives has never been more important.”

Plus, the effects of climate change don’t necessarily show up immediately, but can accumulate over time, explains Welty, “so it’s important that the data collection continue,” especially as climate change accelerates.

The BES is unique because it “brings scientists, stakeholders, policy makers, and students to the table on a regular basis to perform research, interpret results and understand outcomes,” says Swan. This level of collaboration on such a large scale enables BES to have a substantial impact, locally and in other urban areas around the world. This impact can be felt in the well-being of urban residents, he adds, “none more so than the people of Baltimore.”

Banner image: Chris Swan tends native plants at a UMBC greenhouse. All photos by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC.

NSF grants UMBC and community college partners $1.4M to innovate science education

UMBC has received a new five-year, $1.4 million grant to further expand the university’s tradition of innovative undergraduate teaching and strong partnerships with community colleges to support the success of students from all backgrounds. The Improving Undergraduate Science Education (IUSE) grant from the National Science Foundation will focus on teaching and learning in biology, following similar work on the chemistry curriculum in 2016 and 2017.

At the center of this work will be close collaboration with area partners Howard Community College, Anne Arundel Community College, Community College of Baltimore County, and Montgomery College.

The first aim of the grant focuses on aligning curriculum in biology across all the partner institutions to improve the transfer student experience.

It’s about “getting faculty in the same room to talk about how biology is taught,” says Laura Ott, executive director for IUSE and director of the College of Natural and Mathematical Science’s Science Education Research Unit.

Faculty from all partner institutions will meet regularly to discuss course content and potential differences in class size, assessment methods, facilities, or teaching techniques that could impact the student experience. They’ll outline ways to either limit those differences or to better prepare students to anticipate them and feel confident in knowing how to handle them.

Biology by the numbers

The grant’s second goal creates the NEXUS Institute in Quantitative Biology, which builds on work by UMBC faculty to develop, implement, and evaluate biology teaching modules that incorporate quantitative reasoning skills. That work found that some students gained more from the modules than others. Transfer students in particular seemed to have more trouble applying their math skills to biology.

With this finding in mind, faculty from the partner institutions will work together throughout the year “to come up with a common set of modules to be used in the four core biology courses, so everyone is getting the same exposure, no matter what point they enter UMBC,” says biology professor Jeff Leips, one of the IUSE leads. The materials that are developed will be made completely public, so other institutions can utilize them as well. Instructors will also receive guidance on how to use the modules in their courses.

“The idea is that over five years we’ll develop a whole warehouse, a repertoire of these modules that people can mix and match to align with the cultures of their departments,” says Bill LaCourse, dean of the College of Natural and Mathematical Sciences at UMBC.“The modules are a tool to get people to talk, to give them something to think about,” he adds, “so they can build fruitful collaborations across their unique institutions founded in their shared commitment to student success.”

For Leips, helping biology students develop their quantitative reasoning skills  “is exciting, because it’s necessary.” As science continues to become more quantitative, gaining the relevant skills is imperative to students’ long-term success. “You can’t get away with being a researcher or a medical practitioner without understanding quantitative applications,” he says. “There’s a societal need.”

Sharing skills

The third goal for the grant is to support faculty development. UMBC offers a certificate for instructors who want to embrace active learning and inquiry-based teaching practices. Under IUSE, Linda Hodges, director of UMBC’s Faculty Development Center, will work to make a similar certificate available to instructors from all the partner institutions.

“Cohesive, steady engagement” and “practice, feedback, and reflection” are known to encourage lasting change among teachers, explains Hodges, which, in turn, “is linked to improved student learning.”

Supporting educators in this way will also help them develop a sense of community and share their own knowledge of best practices with one another—as Dean LaCourse describes, “to take the best of everything we do and bring it together.” This work with faculty could also broaden the reach of the project, as that community of educators goes on to publish about successful, new techniques for teaching biology.

The new IUSE grant marks the third successful UMBC-community college partnership to improve the educational experience and learning outcomes for transfer students in the sciences. At their core, these partnerships “are about building relationships, better communication, and building a community that benefits the students, the faculty, and the institutions,” LaCourse says. “My students are your students, and your students are my students,” he adds. “The idea is to make a bigger tent, and not work as two institutions, but as one.”

Image: Weihong Lin (second from left), associate professor of biological sciences, works with her students in the lab. Photo by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC.

UMBC and community colleges collaborate to boost transfer student success in STEM

UMBC welcomes a large number of students from community colleges every semester, including in STEM majors. To better support these students, UMBC partnered with Anne Arundel Community College, Community College of Baltimore County, Howard Community College, and Montgomery College to develop and implement the STEM Transfer Student Success Initiative (t-STEM). This initiative was sponsored by the Provost’s office and initially funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Too often, efforts in higher education to support transfer students are grounded in a “deficit model,” focusing on assumed needs or gaps, says Sarah Jewett, executive director of t-STEM at UMBC. She sees things differently.

“I was really interested in looking at transfer from an asset-based perspective,” Jewett says. “Transfer students bring so many experiences and talents to this campus, just like every other student, and I think those strengths need to be recognized and tapped.”

When looking at factors that challenge transfer student success, Jewett suggests, “Rather than asking, ‘What do you not have?’ we should be asking, ‘What are we not doing?’” Figuring out the best plan forward depended on important collaborative work from the Office of Undergraduate Education, Off-Campus Student Services, the Office for Academic and Pre-Professional Advising, and the College of Natural and Mathematical Sciences, all of which sponsored important outcomes of the Initiative, and helped to develop key processes, resources, and services.

Strong foundations

An asset-based approach opened the door to forming strong relationships between UMBC and partner community colleges. “The whole t-STEM project was really about building foundational relationships between students, colleagues, and institutions,” explains Jewett. “That was our initial goal in all of this—to build those relationships in ways that felt real to people.”

Working collaboratively within and across institutions, t-STEM provided access to customized advising, peer networks, and a range of resources for transfer students both before and after their transition. With the support of staff from the Division of Information Technology and Common Vision, the team was able to create and deliver an online library of instructional resources, interactive tools, animated videos, and student/faculty testimonials.

That collaborative approach made it possible to pilot solutions to longstanding problems, like aligning curricula across campuses. Could a student who successfully completed courses at a community college smoothly move forward in the next level of those subjects at UMBC?  If not, how could partner institutions work together to better support that transition?

A great quintet

With support from Bill LaCourse, dean of the College of Natural and Mathematical Sciences and professor of chemistry at UMBC, faculty from UMBC and partner community colleges began by examining introductory chemistry.

Rather than simply check if topics listed on a UMBC syllabus were also listed on community college syllabi, teams of instructors engaged in meaningful conversation around all aspects of teaching and learning introductory chemistry. Partners from all five institutions published their results in the Journal of Chemical Education, providing a model for other institutions to follow.

“The chemistry curriculum alignment was groundbreaking, as everything was evaluated for alignment: curriculum, pedagogy, assessment, course policies, facilities,” says Patti Turner ’74, biological sciences, and professor of anatomy and physiology at Howard Community College.

“The process played out like a great quintet,” adds Margaret Latimer, vice president and provost at Montgomery College. “Each of the five colleges was heard and the faculty developed a rhythm as they worked together to ensure that students would be successful and meet expected standards.”

Both UMBC and the community colleges made changes to help ensure the success of transfer students in chemistry. For example, students were advised to take introductory course sequences at the same institution in order to avoid missing key course content. Additionally, participating faculty at the community colleges began including a few multiple-choice questions on their tests to better prepare students for assessments in large classes at UMBC, and UMBC faculty added open-response questions.

Ongoing growth

For faculty, “The project has enabled us to create long-standing relationships that make working on other projects seamless,” says Turner. “Because we worked really hard on building those relationships, and didn’t rush them, they’re still around, and they’re being leveraged for new opportunities,” adds Jewett.

“UMBC is in a unique position to support transfer students because of our foundation in inclusive excellence,” says Jewett. “The attention to transfer students has really grown in my time here,” she adds, but as UMBC president Freeman Hrabowski is known to say, “Success is never final.”

In that spirit, the current focus of UMBC and our community college partners is leveraging the t-STEM partnership for new and innovative proposals to support transfer success across the disciplines. “We still have a lot of work to do,” Jewett says. “There’s always work to be done.”

Image: Students work together at UMBC’s CNMS Active Science Teaching and Learning Environment (CASTLE). Photo by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC.

Third annual UMBC GRIT-X talks highlight thought-provoking ideas, experiences, and discoveries

Artists, scientists, and social change agents from across UMBC presented the third annual GRIT-X talks on October 13, sharing their ideas and perspectives on stage in UMBC’s Dance Cube. “All our talks gave a different facet, a different beam of light, on what we do at UMBC,” said Vice President for Research Karl Steiner, who spearheaded the event.

The value of stories

Documentary filmmaker Richard Chisolm ’82, interdisciplinary studies, explained how many documentaries and reality television shows today are tightly scripted and controlled, and how, in contrast, he uses an in-the-moment style of filmmaking to produce films that honestly represent a microcosm of the larger story.

Through films like Cafeteria Man, focused on school food reform, and Gun Show, about an artist who makes sculptures of assault weapons out of found objects, Chisolm gives viewers an entry point into thorny issues. Each topic he tackles is a “huge iceberg, the tip of which is an hour documentary,” Chisolm says. “The noblest thing to do is to tell stories in a way that the tip of the iceberg represents the iceberg fairly.”

Manil Suri, mathematics, emphasized in his talk that storytelling can benefit disciplines beyond literature and film. “Stories underlie so much of what we do, including math and other STEM subjects,” he said.

Suri weaves together his passions for storytelling and math on a daily basis: He teaches a course with Michele Osherow, English, about the relationship between math and the humanities, and he’s written a novel, The Godfather of Numbers, that is a sort of creation story for mathematics. He’s using excerpts from it in his math classes this fall.

Suri also urges people who are less keen on mathematics to broaden their perspective of what math is. “Math is about more than calculations,” he says. “It’s about ideas, and ideas, such as infinity, can be enjoyed by everyone.”

Nicole King, American studies, enjoys listening to and learning from others’ stories, with a focus on residents of Baltimore City. After an accident totaled her Corolla in 2010, King decided to go carless, which, she says, removed a barrier to her truly listening to Baltimore. Through taking the bus and more closely connecting with Baltimore in other ways, King shared, “I started to really see the beauty—that cacophony of voices and sounds—that make a city a city.”

King’s research seeks to understand how Baltimore residents are responding to change across the city, with a particular focus on public markets like Lexington Market, and arts districts like Station North. Through that work, “I found listening, really listening, has been the most important, but also the most difficult, method I have used in my research,” she said. She creates opportunities for her students to “show up and listen” through immersive class projects.

Listening to her students has helped shape her teaching and research, too. “Give students the agency to shape projects,” she recommends. “They have good ideas and should be taken seriously.”

Doing things differently

Deborah Thompson Eisenberg ’91, political science, is a professor of law at the University of Maryland Carey School of Law, where she directs the Center for Dispute Resolution. She was motivated to pursue a law career because, she explained, “When our democracy encounters crisis, lawyers and the judiciary tend to step in to give voice to the powerless, enforce our laws and our Constitutional rights, and protect the most vulnerable.” However, over time, she reflected, “I’ve come to believe that if lawyers and judges truly want to foster a culture of conflict resolution, we need more than the power of the rule of law.”

Eisenberg began to focus on alternatives to traditional litigation: mediation and restorative justice practices, teaching our youth to “talk it out to work it out,” and teaching our politicians “to use consensus-building policies.” Conflict is inevitable and has been intensifying, Eisenberg argued, but “we can transform our culture of conflict to a culture of conflict resolution if we use all of our superpowers,” combining the rule of law, alternative dispute resolution, community connections, and education.

Disney’s Princess Tiana may not be a superhero, but, as the first black Disney princess, she is larger than life in the eyes of many young girls of color. Kimberly Moffitt, associate professor of language, literacy, and culture and Africana studies, discussed how Tiana broke the mold of the traditional Disney princess with her entrepreneurial, ambitious spirit in The Princess and the Frog. “Princess Tiana pushes the bounds of the princess trope and says, ‘No more. We can do this differently,’” Moffitt said.

However, Moffitt explained, Tiana is also an example of the “glass cliff,” a phenomenon in business where companies are more likely to hire women and people of color to leadership roles when those companies are in times of crisis and the risk of failure is highest. When Tiana came out in 2009, Disney hadn’t had a new princess-style protagonist since Mulan in 1998, and the brand was faltering. The Princess and the Frog didn’t achieve box office success itself, but, Moffitt argued, “Tiana created space for the next three princesses,” who all were more independent than their predecessors: Rapunzel in Tangled, Merida in Brave, and Moana in Moana. “Tiana was a catalyst to shift our perception of what a princess could look like—in skin tone as well as her actions.”

Eric Dyer ’95, professor of visual arts, shifts our perception of what moving pictures can be by reimagining the zoetrope, one of the original forms of motion picture. Zoetropes use a series of snapshots in a spinning cylinder to trick the mind into seeing a moving scene. “As an artist, I pick up the tactile and interactive zoetrope where it was abandoned 120 years ago,” Dyer said, “and continuously reinvent it to make films, interactive animated sculptures, and immersive installations.”

At GRIT-X, Dyer demonstrated his work for the audience and, for the first time, shared the story behind each piece. Attendees enjoyed frolicking onions and peppers and reflected on Dyer’s exploration of the industrial heydays of the U.S. and China. “Thank you for sharing this performance storytelling experience with me today,” Dyer shared as he closed. “There’s something very human about it that isn’t possible either virtually or remotely.”

Shifting the culture

Diane Bell McKoy ’73, social work and sociology, is the CEO of Associated Black Charities of Maryland. She used her GRIT-X talk as an opportunity to share a powerful personal story of seeking treatment for depression in a broken mental healthcare system. Systems in place in the United States, she argued, perpetuate stigma and fail to support a sense of self-worth for people of color, and she is working to change them.

McKoy’s work has a particular focus on closing the racial wealth gap. If wealth continues to accrue at current rates, it would take a black family 228 years to accrue as much wealth as a white family, McKoy said, and it would take a Latino family 84 years. McKoy encouraged attendees to “look at the world through a new lens” and be willing to question current systems, from employment to education to healthcare.

Shawn Bediako, psychology, is also interested in changing perceptions around race, with a focus on health and science. “Ideas about race can become inscribed in our minds if they’re repeated often enough,” he said at GRIT-X, using the example that many people seem to believe, incorrectly, that sickle cell disease is exclusive to black people.

Bediako went on to explain how race is a complex legal, social, and cultural construct that impacts people’s lives in dramatic ways. But he also shared that he has hope this can change, and that UMBC can develop leaders who will impact the way we think about race. “I feel confident that an institution like ours, with a commitment to inclusive excellence at all levels of the arts, humanities, and sciences,” he said, “can help…change this inscription and hopefully shift this paradigm.”

To close the program, Kavita Krishnaswamy ’07, computer science and mathematics, Ph.D. ’19, computer science, shared her work developing solutions to assist people with disabilities and mobility challenges. Krishnaswamy, who has spinal muscular atrophy, gave her presentation via a telepresence device that allows her to navigate the world from her home in Columbia, Maryland.

Krishnaswamy is the recipient of the Google Lime Scholarship, was named a Microsoft Fellow, and was included among the Baltimore Sun’s “25 Women to Watch.” She is currently working on projects including a bed that allows people with mobility challenges to adjust their position along many different axes of movement, and a robot to enable people who previously could not use the bathroom unassisted to do so independently.

“We have a lot of problems in the world, and I really feel that robotics can solve many of those problems,” Krishnaswamy said. “So in that way we can really promote social progress and elevate the global living standards. That, in turn, can increase the quality of life for people with disabilities, seniors, and their families.”

One of her closing remarks echoed the sentiments of others at GRIT-X. “Even though our perspectives are many and diverse, our vision is one,” she concluded. Whether dismantling stigma, finding new ways to connect students with intimidating subjects, or changing how we think about conflict, all the speakers emphasized how the UMBC community can reach together to improve the world of tomorrow.

Banner image: Manil Suri, mathematics, at GRIT-X. All photos by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC.
Explore video of all GRIT-X talks on the Research at UMBC website. 

UMBC researchers develop new method to address deep-seated biases in science, starting with birds

New UMBC research is helping dismantle gender and publication biases in science. A team of researchers working across disciplines has developed a new statistical technique to understand similarity, rather than difference, in the natural world. With this new technique, they’ve determined that among Eastern Bluebirds the structure of songs female birds sing is statistically indistinguishable from songs males sing.

Awareness of female birdsong is growing worldwide, thanks in part to a breakthrough paper by Karan Odom, Ph.D. ’16, biological sciences, but it’s still understood as a trait found primarily in tropical birds. Evangeline Rose, a current Ph.D. student in the same lab and first author on a new paper in Animal Behavior, wanted to look at song in a temperate species.

During Rose’s fieldwork, “I was finding that the females were singing, to me, what sounded just like male songs,” she says. “So we started thinking about equality, and equivalence, and how to test for it.” On the advice of her advisor, Kevin Omland, professor of biological sciences, she reached out to Thomas Mathew, professor of statistics, who has expertise in statistical equivalence.

Challenging a paradigm

Working together, the team modified a statistical method used in generic drug testing to meet their needs for ecology and animal behavior studies. The existing test helps determine whether generic and brand name drugs are “statistically equivalent,” meaning they are similar enough to be prescribed safely for the same purpose. The new modification will allow scientists in other fields to test for equivalence. Before, researchers could only report they did not find a significant difference—a very different statement than saying two things are conclusively equivalent.

“We’re really hoping this new method is going to address some issues with what kinds of data get published,” Rose says. “The most important thing about being a good scientist is to be unbiased. And the whole tradition of testing for difference really leads to incredible biases in scientists,” Omland says. He adds, “There’s a whole realm of things in nature that we find interesting and important because of their similarity.”

For example, in addition to similarities in songs between the sexes in birds, researchers could use the new test to ask if two species use the same type of habitat, respond the same way to predators, or consume the same food sources. Answers to those questions could fill long-standing knowledge gaps, or even inform conservation efforts.

“This test is really broadly applicable,” says Rose, “and we’re hoping to introduce it more to the ecology and evolution field.”

A new approach

One advantage of the new method is it accounts for unequal sample sizes. In a medical study, researchers can carefully control the size of treatment and control groups. In other fields, from ecology, to engineering, to agriculture, that’s often not possible. The new test also allows researchers to determine the equivalence of several traits simultaneously, Mathew explains. For example, in this study, the authors found that the male and female birds’ songs were statistically equivalent across five different characteristics, such as duration of each song and the range of pitches the birds produced.

Rather than testing whether two things are exactly equal, the team was looking for a way to determine if two things were “close enough,” given a defined allowable margin of difference. Because of that added layer, “There are additional challenges here,” Mathew says.

“Even though this methodology is out there, it hasn’t been applied—even in statistics—with this kind of data. That’s why I was very excited when they brought this project to me,” Mathew says. Rose adds, “It ended up being a really great partnership to look at these questions that hadn’t been asked before for female song, and we also ended up modifying this test in a really cool, new way.”

Changing science

As research on similarities grows, there is also a growing drive to remove the bias against publishing studies that do not find a significant difference, often termed a “negative result.” This paper “is part of an amazing drumbeat that’s building up in the scientific community,” Omland says. “There’s a broader problem with the scientific method that’s being increasingly acknowledged, and the test we’ve developed can at least play a small role, and I hope a big role, in addressing it.”

Rose, who plans to next investigate the function of female bluebird songs, says she will carry these new techniques with her as she moves through her research career. “I think in the future, I’ll be thinking about how equivalence can change the questions we’re asking, and I’ll always keep in mind that we have extra tools in the toolkit.”

Image: An Eastern Bluebird, Rose’s study organism, sits on a fence. Photo by Dolan Trout, used under CC 2.0.

UMBC’s Sebastian Deffner receives FQXi support for pioneering work to define laws of the universe

Sebastian Deffner plans to spend his career expanding on the work of physics giants to refine our understanding of the fundamental laws of nature, from the inner workings of the tiniest cells to the dynamics of the largest cosmic phenomena. Deffner, an assistant professor of physics at UMBC, recently moved forward in this work through a pioneering paper in Physical Review X with CalTech collaborator Anthony Bartolotta, and now has a new grant to push the envelope even further.

As their paper describes, Deffner and Bartolotta have developed more accurate ways to determine how energy is used, released, and transformed in very small systems with very high energy, which had previously been poorly understood. Deffner’s new grant from the Foundational Questions Institute (FQXi) will enable him to further develop a new field of physics that focuses on energy and information processing.

The origin of intelligence

The FQXi sought research projects that would address the question of agency in the physical world. It’s common to think about actions as being caused by some external force—flipping a switch, pushing a lever—but those levers and switches “are all part of the same universe,” Deffner explains. “We don’t have any scientific idea that there could be something acting on the universe from the outside, which means that anything that happens within the universe actually arises from interaction of different parts of the universe. Nothing comes for free.”

“Now, if this is true, how does something like intelligence or agency actually arise from the very fundamental laws of physics that describe the universe?” he asks. To address that question, Deffner has turned to a new field of physics known as the thermodynamics of information. Classic thermodynamics considers how energy in the forms of heat and work is transformed in physical systems. But Deffner thinks there’s more to it.

Including information

“We don’t get a complete thermodynamic picture if we neglect information. If we only think about heat and work, we will always end up with statements that seem to violate the axioms of thermodynamics,” Deffner says. “Only if we include information processing, and understand what that actually means, do we get a complete thermodynamic picture.”

The idea is that writing and erasing information in a system involves energy, so evaluations of the overall energy in a system must consider information processing. Understanding energy and information processing is important for describing the universe, but it’s also important for more practical applications.

Scientists and engineers are working to develop the next generation of information storage, and it may take the form of “quantum memory”—systems that rely on quantum mechanics and the stability of extremely cold groups of atoms (near absolute zero) to store information.

“If you want to build a quantum memory out of these ultra-cold atoms,” Deffner explains, “you have to understand how information actually is written and how you can stabilize the information content of these systems.”

A universe in flux

Current theories, such as thermodynamics, work well when a system is in equilibrium. However, “if you look at the universe, it’s not in thermal equilibrium. It’s not even close,” Deffner says. For example, think of a star like our Sun constantly releasing heat and light through extremely high-energy reactions.

So, “What I want to do is to take stochastic thermodynamics that we’ve developed for small quantum systems and small biological systems, and apply these concepts and notions to cosmology to get a better understanding of the extremes of the universe,” Deffner says. He’ll be charting new territory in the extraordinarily complex math that describes, at a fundamental level, how the world works.

Following the dream

As his career progresses, Deffner hopes to help generate “a better, more concise understanding of the universe,” he says, “but for that we need a lot of bits and pieces, and almost nothing like this has been done yet.”

The Physical Review X paper took the first baby steps toward developing the basis to move forward with this work. Now, Deffner is off and running, but he recognizes the journey will be a marathon, not a sprint.

“We know which direction we’re going now, and we know which steps to take,” he says, “but we will not be able to describe the universe in 2020. If we’re lucky, that’s something for 2050.”

One thing Deffner does know is that he’s committed to the marathon. “If you don’t dream big, what are you going to do?” he asks. “Sometimes you have to take a risk and follow the dream.”

30th UMBC Alumni Awards celebrate leadership, service, and community

UMBC community members from the university’s first class to today kicked off Homecoming 2018 on October 4 with a celebration of UMBC Alumni Award winners. Held in the Earl and Danielle Linehan Concert Hall, the moving and memorable ceremony reflected the rich community that is UMBC and honored the tremendous achievements of eight exceptional awardees.

As the evening began, John Becker ’01, information systems, president of the UMBC Alumni Association, remarked, “The alumni and faculty we will recognize tonight truly capture the depth of the UMBC community.” President Freeman Hrabowski encouraged attendees to “listen, learn, and be inspired.”

Kimberly Ellison-Taylor ’93, information systems, received the 2018 Outstanding Alumna in Engineering and Information Technology Award. She bridges her knowledge in technology and finance as a global strategy director at Oracle. She is also the youngest person and first African-American woman to be elected as chair of the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants.

Greg Simmons, M.P.P. ’04, public policy, and vice president of institutional advancement, described Ellison-Taylor as “a visionary in her field” who can “see the future in the work that she does.” Still, he says, despite her success, “she’s never forgotten where she’s come from, and she’s made sure she’s opened pathways for others to have success that she’s modeled so well.”

Ellison-Taylor grew up in Baltimore’s Sandtown-Winchester neighborhood. “Statistically, I shouldn’t be here,” she shared, but “UMBC provided a foundation of unparalleled opportunity. It empowered, enabled, equipped, and energized me to succeed.”

Through her participation in the Sigma Gamma Rho sorority, Ellison-Taylor began paying it forward, supporting others in finding their paths. “Everyone deserves respect and dignity,” she said, “whether they’re the CEO or the janitor.”

Allan Kittleman ’81, political science, introduced Zainab Alkebsi ’09, political science, this year’s Rising Star Award recipient. Alkebsi serves as policy counsel for the National Association for the Deaf.

As a child, Alkebsi was frustrated by the lack of accessibility for deaf and hard-of-hearing people like herself. She recalled attending a movie and seeing everyone around her laughing while she couldn’t follow the dialogue. So, at 11 years old, “I resolved that I was going to go to law school and advocate for full, equal access,” she told the crowd through an interpreter. “Now, here I am—in the trenches of the battle to break down barriers to accessibility for the Deaf and hard-of-hearing communities.”

Among her many achievements as an advocate, Alkebsi recently negotiated 100 percent captioning for in-flight entertainment on several major airlines. Now a mother, she imagines her daughter “boarding a flight and knowing the role her mother played in ensuring greater accessibility.”

Alkebsi thanked her UMBC professors for encouraging her personal and professional growth. She shared that she continues to give back to UMBC by presenting guest lectures focused on the Deaf community.

Kathleen Hoffman, mathematics, and David Mitch, economics, introduced Mark Doms ’86, mathematics and economics, the 2018 Outstanding Alumnus in Natural and Mathematical Sciences Award recipient. A leading economic policy expert, Doms served on the Board of Governors for the Federal Reserve and as the Under Secretary for Economic Affairs at the Department of Commerce under the Obama administration, and worked at Japan’s largest investment bank.

“I couldn’t have gotten a better education anywhere else,” Doms shared, of his time at UMBC. His math classes taught him to analyze data appropriately, and his economics classes taught him “how to think about the world’s problems in a rigorous manner.”

In addition to a strong academic preparation, “UMBC instilled in me a sense of public service,” Doms said. His career has been primarily in the public sector, and he intends to teach at a public university when he returns to the United States from his current work in Europe.

Saira Khan ’09, English, is UMBC’s 2018 Outstanding Alumna in the Humanities. Chris Corbett, English, noted, “She has achieved more in just a few years than some aspiring journalists achieve in an entire career.”

Khan began her career as a freelancer for Dawn, an English-language publication in her native Pakistan, “moving seamlessly between two very complicated worlds,” Corbett said. Less than a decade later, she is now director of social media for The New Yorker.

Attending UMBC was “one of the best decisions I have made in my life,” Khan shared. “I left this place with relationships that I have carried with me for the last 10 years, and I know I will have them with me for the rest of my life. For that, I will be forever grateful.”

Mina Cheon, M.F.A. ’02, imaging and digital arts, also moves seamless between worlds, from Korea to New York City to UMBC. She says “artists are agents of change,” and they become leaders who “perform art projects in social spaces that matter.”

Her often-controversial art includes a series of political videos framed as art history lessons, which she placed on flash drives inside balloons and launched from South Korea over the border with North Korea. The South Korean president and first lady visited her most recent exhibition.

Cheon’s connection to the university has been long-lasting. She graduated from UMBC with her infant son in her arms, and now he is studying math at UMBC. “Thank you for being the leading, visionary STEAM research community where I grew abundantly and where my son will be nurtured to flourish in his academic track,” she shared.

Cheon also mentioned her gratitude for UMBC faculty and staff’s dedication to “shaping the future by empowering the artist in society.” Her nominator, Kathy O’Dell, visual arts, said simply, “Dr. Cheon is a treasure.”

Wanda Keyes Heard ’79, political science, the 2018 Outstanding Alumna in Social Sciences Award recipient, is the first female chief judge of the 8th Judicial Circuit. Keyes Heard holds this position following 19 years of service as a circuit court judge in Baltimore City. She has mentored dozens of UMBC students and fellow judges.

“UMBC helped prepare me to accomplish my professional goals,” she says, “to break through race and gender bias and barriers, because I was a woman headed into a field where people just didn’t look like me.”

Like other recipients, Keyes Heard also talked about relationships and community. “I embraced this campus, and it embraced me,” she said. She described UMBC as “not only my academic home, but my home away from home.” Many of her former classmates, who remain her close friends, attended the ceremony to cheer her achievement. “They’re here tonight,” Keyes Heard said, “because they are still my family after 40 years.”

Mimi Haw Dietrich ’70, American studies, received the 2018 Outstanding Alumna for Distinguished Service Award. As a founder of the “Fab Four” group (comprised of members of UMBC’s first four graduating classes), Dietrich remembers a time when UMBC included just three buildings.

“We planted the seeds for UMBC’s greatness many years ago just by believing in a new university,” she shared. She chose to attend because Albin O. Kuhn, UMBC’s first president, “promised that we would be pioneers.”

For UMBC’s 50th anniversary, Dietrich was one of the first to galvanize alumni to organize and participate in the celebrations. She continues to serve UMBC by organizing Fab Four events. She previously served on the Alumni Association Board of Directors and was named UMBC Volunteer of the Year in 1999 along with her husband, Bob Dietrich ’70, biological sciences.

Professionally, Dietrich has been dedicated to spreading her love of quilting and needlework as an educator for 50 years. She was inducted into the Quilters Hall of Fame in 2015 and named the Professional Quilter of the Year in 2013.

Mariajose Castellanos, chemical, biochemical, and environmental engineering, is the 2018 Outstanding Faculty Award recipient. Castellanos, a teaching faculty member, expressed gratitude that her department supported her when she “chose to pursue teaching and leadership through service,” rather than continue in research.

Jeremy Drew ’17, chemical engineering, reflected on the great impact of her work as an educator, for him and so many others. “She showed me the value of trying a problem I wasn’t sure how to solve,” said Drew. He continued,“Dr. C. cares about the well-being of her students, and adapts to each of their individual needs in order to bring them the most comprehensive education possible.”

Throughout the event, speaker after speaker reflected on meaningful friendships and strong bonds with mentors at UMBC—connections that have lasted over decades. President Hrabowski drew on this theme as he offered closing remarks. “The older I get, the more I realize there’s nothing more important than friends and family,” he said. “It is the notion of community through which we are all connected.”

Banner image: Wanda Keyes Heard ’79 speaks to a full Linehan Concert Hall. All images by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC.

Annica Wayman M6, ’99, to launch translational science program at Shady Grove

For Annica Wayman M6, ’99, mechanical engineering, this fall marks a homecoming wrapped up in a new beginning. After eight years with the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), building programs from the ground up to support research projects that address international development challenges such as global health, agriculture, food security, and renewable energy, Wayman is ready for a new chapter.

Wayman, who holds a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering with a bioengineering emphasis from Georgia Tech, sees parallels between what she did at USAID and her new role at UMBC as the College of Natural and Mathematical Science’s associate dean for Shady Grove affairs. In particular, a UMBC campaign t-shirt with “Transform Lives” in large, bold print caught her attention.

“That’s what I was doing at USAID,” Wayman says, “and that’s what I have a chance to do here through science and engineering.” As leader of the charge to launch UMBC’s new Translational Life Science Technology (TLST) undergraduate program at Shady Grove, “There’s still a theme of translating scientific discovery to solutions that transform society, so I’m able to do that, and I’m also transforming students’ lives so they can go on to do those things.”

Building a New Program

The brand-new TLST program, which is administered through the College of Natural and Mathematical Sciences (CNMS), trains students in the work that happens “behind the scenes,” Wayman explains—between discoveries in basic science and fully-forged applications in practitioners’ hands, such as drugs or medical devices. Often, gaps in communication and a lack of translational science professionals prevent promising new therapies from ever getting past the earliest stages of development.

The TLST program hopes to change that by training people in the “in between” tasks, such as conducting animal studies and clinical trials, developing processes to scale up production of promising treatments, and learning how to make sure new products are the ones practitioners actually need to help patients.

Wayman will also lead a re-launch of the Master of Professional Studies degree in biotechnology at Shady Grove, which had previously been offered at main campus. Other new programs may follow.

Wayman says UMBC is well-suited to offer such programs at Shady Grove for several reasons, including the Rockville campus’ location in the heart of Montgomery County, where 75 percent of Maryland’s 2,300 life science companies have set up shop. In addition, “UMBC is not scared to take risks,” Wayman says, “and we look for those cutting-edge opportunities to be at the forefront of what careers and industry needs are out there, so that we can prepare students for what is to come and not just what’s already here.”

UMBC’s culture of inclusive excellence is also an asset. “You really need a diverse set of folks—not just diverse in disciplines, but also a diversity of thinking and ethnicity,” says Wayman, who is an alumna of the Meyerhoff (M6 cohort) and MARC Scholar programs. “UMBC has always been really good at fostering an equal playing field,” she adds, “so that all people feel like their voices matter and they can all equally achieve and work together.”

A Supportive Community

Wayman credits her own success in part to the supportive culture she experienced as an undergraduate. “When I was here, I felt that the Meyerhoff staff and the faculty just had such a caring approach,” she shares. In addition, “as an engineering class, we were great peer mentors to each other… Being an African-American female in engineering, I was looking to be sure I could get the support I would need and UMBC delivered greater than my expectations.”

On top of her strong STEM background, Wayman understands that the success of the scientific enterprise is driven by interdisciplinary collaboration. “From where I come from at USAID, that’s huge—we realize that understanding the technology alone is not sufficient to solve a development challenge. You have to understand the culture, the people, the political context, the history of the country.”

“UMBC is continuing to try to push the envelope into what’s the next wave of innovative education, not just in STEM but also blending it with the arts and humanities,” Wayman says, and she’s looking forward to being part of that push.

Learn more about UMBC’s new Translational Life Science Technology and Master of Professional Studies in Biotechnology programs.  

 

UMBC physicist Can Ataca developing quicker, cheaper way to create novel, one-atom-thick materials

Imagine a sheet that’s only one atom thick. It won’t keep you very warm, but single-atom-thick materials under development might soon do extraordinary things, like filter salt from water, collect and store solar energy, or protect you from a poisonous gas. These sheets are referred to as two-dimensional materials, and they’re Can Ataca’s specialty.

Ataca, a computational physicist at UMBC, and his collaborator Brenda Rubenstein, a physical chemist at Brown University, have just received a three-year National Science Foundation grant to develop new methods to speed up and reduce the cost of developing new 2D materials. Ataca and his lab members use supercomputers to model possible new 2D materials and predict their properties—magnetic, mechanical, electrical, optical, chemical, and more.

“We can predict the material’s properties before experimentalists can even synthesize it,” says Ataca.

That’s a good thing, because generating a single sample of one of these cutting-edge materials can cost up to $1 million and require highly advanced technical skills and equipment.

New tech, new methods

Modeling 2D materials is not entirely new. In the 1990s, researchers started with models that treated the chemical bonds between atoms like simple springs and completely ignored quantum mechanics, which become very important at small scales—like a one-atom-thick structure.

Why did those early models make assumptions that ignored quantum mechanics? Limited computing power was the culprit, but “even though these assumptions make life easier computationally, they come with lower accuracy,” Ataca explains.

Computers today are vastly more powerful than in the 1990s, and Ataca is taking advantage of that to develop more accurate methodology that accounts for quantum mechanics. Methods that incorporate quantum mechanics are currently available, but the new methodological framework Ataca’s lab is developing, called Quantum Monte Carlo, is an order of magnitude more accurate than existing quantum methods. Its results get extremely close to what experimental physicists would find in the lab with the real material.

The older methods are currently easier to implement because the computer code to run tests with them already exists: Enter a handful of parameters, click a button, and come back a day later to collect your results. The newer techniques that Ataca, Ph.D. students Daniel Wines and Gracie Chaney, and postdoctoral researcher Fatih Ersan are working to develop “are a much more hands-on process,” Ataca says. “In order to reach one result, you need to do around 100 different calculations, which require rigorous processing after each step.”

Next stop, applications

The current project is a proof-of-concept to show that the new methods work. “First, we are going to show the world that Quantum Monte Carlo is doing a better job. We’re trying to come up with a kind of recipe,” Ataca says. After that, they may collaborate with researchers seeking materials for specific applications.

Scientists who physically create these materials in their labs will rely on the results of models like Ataca’s to make major investment decisions in their labs, so it’s critical that the new method’s predictions can be trusted. To verify that results generated with the new code are accurate, the research team will compare them against existing experimental data for 2D materials.

“After we’ve done lots of this, and get the same results as the experiments, we are going to make these codes available to anyone,” Ataca says. He hopes that their work will eventually be used to create a wide variety of novel materials.

“With this methodology we can get the optimal properties of these materials with a very high accuracy,” Ataca explains, “so we can definitely say, ‘Hey, this material is good for photovoltaics [solar cells], that material is good for hydrogen generation, this material can bind this kind of poisonous gas.’”

By shortcutting the discovery process, the new methods could be a game-changer for developing not only 2D materials, but also any crystal structures or molecules.  As Ataca says, “This could be the beginning of a new computational era.”

Image: Can Ataca, second from left, meets with some of his students. Photo by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC.

UMBC’s Rachel Brewster investigates cellular survival to improve the preservation of organs for transplant

Two years ago, developmental biologist Rachel Brewster embarked on a journey to learn more about how zebrafish embryos manage to survive for up to 50 hours without oxygen, with support from a Department of Defense Idea Discovery Grant. The ultimate goal was to develop new methods to preserve organs for transplant, allowing them to last longer and travel farther to those in need. NIH has now rewarded the noteworthy progress of Brewster’s research team with a $400,000, two-year Exploratory Research Award to continue the work.

When human cells are deprived of oxygen, their energy production drops dramatically—but demand for energy stays high. This leads to tissue damage and death, sometimes within only a few minutes. When zebrafish are faced with low-oxygen conditions, however, the amount of energy they demand also drops. “Even though the level of ATP [cellular energy] drops, it is met by an equivalent drop in ATP consumption,” Brewster explains. “It’s the equivalent of reaching a new status quo.”

Figuring out how zebrafish activate that shift has been central to the research team’s efforts. If the same pathway could be induced in human tissue, there is potential to significantly delay tissue deterioration.

Graduate students Jong Park and Tim Hufford and many undergraduates, including Austin Gabel ‘17, Bryanna Canales ‘19, Afia Osei-Ntansah ‘20, Darius McKoy ‘20, Nguyet Le ‘20, and Neil Tran ’20, have majorly contributed to the lab’s work so far. Brewster will continue to rely on their commitment to the project moving forward.

Clues from cancer

In collaboration with Young-Sam Lee at Johns Hopkins, Brewster found that when cells were deprived of oxygen, the amount of lactate in the cells quickly increased. Once thought to be nothing more than a byproduct of anaerobic energy production (often induced by intense exercise), some researchers have found that lactate “might be doing more than we thought,” Brewster says.

For example, in cancer cells, scientists have found that lactate stabilizes a protein called NDRG1. That induces blood vessels to grow toward the cells, delivering more oxygen and allowing them to multiply quickly even in low-oxygen environments.

Growing more cells takes a lot of energy. That’s the opposite of what Brewster is looking for, but still interesting. “We wondered if maybe cancer cells hijack this pathway,” Brewster says, “and if in normal cells the response…would be different but nevertheless adaptive.”

Brewster’s lab put the scientific process to work—conducting experiments, consulting existing research, and talking with fellow scientists—to help clarify the connection between lactate, NDRG1, and survival without oxygen.

Pieces of the puzzle

Brewster had an “epiphany moment” when she realized that the protein NDRG1 is found in the same cells that express a component of sodium-potassium pumps—structures that use large amounts of cellular energy. “Isn’t it intriguing,” she reflects, “that we were looking for a protein that may save energy, and we find it expressed in the exact same cells that have this super energy-demanding pump?”

Brewster explains that because these pumps are so energy-demanding, under long-term low-oxygen conditions many organisms degrade them to preserve energy. NDRG1 is generally found floating in the fluid inside cells, but when oxygen levels drop, it migrates to the cell membrane, where the pumps are embedded. Could it be part of the mechanism responsible for degrading the pumps?

Brewster’s lab took cells that didn’t produce NDRG1 and exposed them to an environment without oxygen to test that idea. “Much to our surprise and delight, we found that the pump was no longer degraded,” Brewster says. “So this is very exciting to us. It also opens up a whole series of other questions.”

Other scientists pointed out that if all NDRG1 did was degrade the pumps, the cell would eventually fill with water and burst open, so now the lab is wondering if NDRG1 does other things, too. For example, maybe it degrades other proteins embedded in the cell membrane that transport molecules in and out of the cell, such as water.

“In essence,” Brewster’s hypothesis goes, “NDRG1 renders the membrane impermeable. And of course, if the cell is to survive this, it would have to be able to reverse it.”

Next steps

Brewster’s collaborator at Harvard, Ryuji Morizane, has found that NDRG proteins are also found in human kidney organoids, and they appear to move to the cell membrane under low-oxygen conditions. So, “We’re left with the big question of why is this pathway protective in fish, and not in humans,” Brewster says. “And this is a very difficult question to answer.”

The lab’s goal is to learn enough about this pathway to harness it to improve organ transplant procedures and increase the number of lives saved by transplants.

Today, organs are preserved by making them very cold, which artificially slows down metabolism and the process of tissue degeneration for a few hours. However, that protocol may “bypass the NDRG response,” Brewster says. “If one could find a different way to prep the tissue, so that the response was triggered right before organ harvest, it could induce a protective state.”

“Maybe lactate is the molecule that triggers the response,” Brewster says. “Maybe it could be as simple as artificially modifying lactate levels before you harvest the organ, and that would do the job. But we don’t know if lactate does that yet.”

That’s what Brewster’s lab aims to find out next. With the new grant, they’ll explore what triggers NDRG to move to the cell membrane—lactate or another factor—and what mechanism degrades the pumps. “We want to know if lactate is that magic molecule that does it all,” Brewster says. “And if it isn’t lactate, we want to be searching for that other molecule.”

Even if they don’t find all the answers, each step in the research brings Brewster’s team closer to solving a cellular mystery and saving lives.

Image: Rachel Brewster in her lab. Photo by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC.

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